


Needful Things

by DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Genre: Early in Canon, F/M, let's straddle the fine line between seduction and submission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2017-09-29
Packaged: 2019-01-06 17:02:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12215082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Yona is far away from anyone who would have been able to answer these questions. Hak tells himself he's just doing the necessary thing.





	Needful Things

**Author's Note:**

> I'm the author and I say everything turns okay here but. hey kids? use protection.
> 
> This is off brand for me but you know what, I'm not apologizing.

There was something off in the air of the campsite, or in the heat of the fire, or in the very darkness of the night. Hak could sense it. Could no one else sense it? He felt like a cat with a ruffled coat, whiskers bristled. The closest he'd felt to this before was in the moments preceding an ambush, some warrior's sixth sense lifting the hairs on the back of his neck. But an hour had come and gone, and then some, and the forest only murmured as quietly as it ever had. His eyes were fixed on the shifting shadows of the evening even as Yona shuffled up behind him and paused there, her footsteps halted in an uncomfortable compromise between a step forward and a step back.

"What is it?" he asked.

"You're... missing dinner," Yona said. There was a shuffle of cloth—he assumed she was holding out some scraps from the meal. "I saved you a fish-"

"You feel it too, don't you?" he said.

A sharp intake of breath.

"You've been acting strange all night," he continued, more sure of his hunch now. "Antsy, even."

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

Hak leaned back on his hands, bending to peer over his shoulder at her. Her face was awfully red. He cracked a smile despite himself. "No, it's good. You should trust your instincts. When something feels off, that means your body is picking up on something that your mind is too slow to process. It's a warrior's skill."

Instead of lighting up like she usually did when he bothered to compliment her, though, Yona just pulled back into herself and looked away. Hak frowned. It wasn't usually his style to encourage her to get cozy with him, but he thought—maybe just this once, he could let it slide. It seemed like she'd hardly touched him today, anyways. She seemed further away, somehow, less tangible.

Hak patted the ground beside himself, and after a moment of hesitation, Yona did finally take a seat.

Come to think of it, the weird vibe he'd been getting all night had really only started when he noticed her walking a few steps behind him, her eyes burning a hole in the back of his head. And each time she almost touched him—each time her hands skated back from his a second too quick, each time she started forward to him only to fall back—the feeling had strengthened.

"Your body is picking up on something, huh?" Yona murmured, folding and unfolding her hem.

Hak glanced sideways at her, underneath his bangs. No one else in the world knew Yona like he did, and if that hadn't been true before the insurrection then it certainly was now. "If something is wrong," he said, quietly, "you should tell me about it. I can't protect you if I don't know what I'm facing."

Her fingers twitched, caught halfway into a motion as if she were about to reach across the ground for him, but then she snatched them back to herself. "It's not—it's none of your business," she said, and her hand hovered over the place where Hak suspected she kept that infernal hairpin.

He leaned over her shoulder, putting on one of his old exaggerated Body Guard Classic expressions. "Everything is my business, princess."

But instead of cracking wise back at him, Yona froze, still very red in the face. "Do you think so?" she said.

Hak pulled back just a fraction. "Well," he said, "sure. It's just the two of us now. And the boy genius over there, of course."

Yona winced. "Promise you won't laugh at me," she said, hiding her mouth behind the palm of her hand.

"Now we both know there's no way I'll promise you that."

Yona scowled at him. "If you laugh at me, I'll die," she said. "I'll just die, right here on the spot. And then what will you have to say to my father in the afterlife?"

Hak lifted his hands. "Oh, alright, if it means that much to you, I'll try."

Yona's scowl dropped, and then there was just the troubled look from before—the distant pale eyes, the lip tucked between her white teeth. Her hand dropped from her breast. "The last time we walked through a town," she said, "you remember how we got separated because of the line for the bath house?"

Hak nodded.

"Well, when I was—when I was alone, when I was trying to walk around the back side of the bath house, I saw this pair of—of lovers—"

Hak let out an abrupt sigh of relief and exasperation. "Is that all?" he said.

Yona walloped his shin with her dainty little foot. "Well it's the first time I've seen anything like that!" she said. "I mean. I saw a maid with a stable boy once, but that wasn't... I didn't see as much then.'"

Hak rolled his eyes. "I'm sorry the uncouth outside world offended your royal sensibilities. You know I can't protect you from literally everything, don't you?"

"I wasn't offended," Yona said, hiding her face behind her hand again.

Oh. Oh no, this was the conversation they were having? Hak found himself caught between retreating and advancing, even his breath stilled in his chest, a hesitation that he knew would mean death on the battle field. Hesitation was the last mistake anyone could afford to make, but always with Yona—with Yona he was always hesitating.

"When I used to think about that stuff," Yona said, "I would always think about Su-won. But now I can't stand thinking about him, it twists me all up inside. I don't know whether I want him or I hate him, I just want to get him out of my head."

Hak watched her with a rapidly growing unease. Yeah, he knew how that felt. He knew how all of that felt.

"I was thinking about," Yona said, her face firmly buried in her hands, "since I'm not sure where I'm going or how long I'll have to do it, I was thinking about letting someone... do that to me."

Before Hak quite knew what he'd done, he already had pried Yona's hands away from her face and held them tight around the wrists, as quickly as he might have snapped his spear into action. So much for hesitation. "Don't say such things," he said. "Who could possibly be worthy of that?"

Yona shrugged, petulantly staring off in the other direction. "I'm tired of being sheltered," she said. "I want to know what other people know. I feel like I'm the last person on earth not to know!"

"Commoners move faster than royalty," Hak said. "That's just the way it is. Once you're secure and safe again, you'll—"

"I'll what!" Yona shouted. "Get married? Have another husband picked out for me? You don't even know if I'll make it that far!"

"You will make it," Hak snapped, "don't talk like that when I'm still here."

"We don't know where this road is going!" Yona said. "If I want to learn archery and politics and, and, screw boys, I'm darn well doing to do it!"

"I'm sorry," Hak said, "did you actually just say that?"

Yona leapt to her feet, her wrists still tightly in Hak's grasp but apparently forgotten. "You just watch me, the next time we're in town—"

Hak tugged. Suddenly the world seemed to be coming to him through a pane of perfectly clear ice, removed from himself, breathtaking but distant. He pulled Yona off balance and caught her as she stumbled towards him, her pale eyes widening in a second that seemed to last a year. He cupped her cheek in one calloused hand.

"No," he said.

"No?" she echoed, thrown completely off track.

"No," he said. "Your life is too valuable to entrust even for a moment to a stranger. I won't leave your side."

Yona gave him an apprehensive look. "You can't mean to just stand there—"

"I mean," Hak said, lifting her hand to rest against his own cheek (if he leaned into the startled touch, who would know?), "you've forgotten the most important thing about this venture."

"What's that?" Yona said. Her chest stuttered with uneven breaths. Hak was afraid to meet her eye, of what he might see there.

"I told you to think of me as your tool," he said. He closed his eyes against the pressure of her soft hand, the strangeness of the dark around them, the force of her gaze. "Use me in whatever way you see fit."

Yona pulled back. "Hak," she said, "you don't mean that."

Part of him thought he ought to be ashamed at the way he chased her touch, surging forward even as she retreated. "You want to know men," Hak said. "I am a man, aren't I?"

He reached out and caught her hovering hand again, pulling it without resistance back toward himself. He pressed her small fingers to the dip of his collarbone, pushing them beneath the fold of his robes. Her fingers twitched, again, but remained flush and hot against his skin. With careful, tight movements, trying not to dislodge her, Hak shrugged his robes off his shoulders, baring his chest to her touch. He had never felt so urgent or so vulnerable as he did under her unblinking gaze, barely breathing, waiting for her approval.

"I'm yours," he said. "Do with me what you will."

The night itself seemed to shudder as Yona slowly dragged her fingers down to the peak of a nipple, hard against the cold of the evening. Hak bit down on a shiver and tried to remain as cool and still as a statue, like an inanimate thing.

Yona paused at the edge of a pectoral, her other hand lingering forgotten against his cheek. "Do you mind if I—"

"Don't even ask," Hak said, his voice suddenly rough in his throat, as if her small hands had split him open and hollowed him out. "Just do it."

Yona seemed to take him at his word. She threw a knee over his side and settled in over his legs, her skirts pooling and swallowing him from the waist down. He tipped his head back and offered up a quick silent prayer to whatever god had taken an interest in his affairs. For all his big talk, he didn't have the guts to deal with Yona catching sight of his twitching cock. He was happy to be her tool. He was not at all happy to unravel the ugly knot of his own mixed desires.

Her hands mapped the panes of his torso, his hips, the shape of his shoulder blades as she leaned into him. For a moment it was as if she were holding him, her soft breasts flat against his chest, her breath in his ear. And then she had the back of his head in her hand, pulling back to watch him with her hungry, uneasy eyes.

"Kiss me," she said. "And— make it good!"

Hak watched her tongue pass slick and dark over her lips. "As you wish," he said.

It was as if some flood gate had been opened in the princess. She kissed like she was starving for him, like she could bury herself in him and be lost forever. She had no idea what she was doing. Hak was nearly dizzy with the urgency of it, the feeling of being wanted so badly—of being hungered for—of being necessary. Gods, he could die like this. He would let her swallow him whole if she only asked.

They fell back onto the grass, and suddenly her hand was between his legs, grasping at him. Hak froze beneath her. His whole body throbbed with shame and desire, as if she had taken every inch of him into her delicate fingers.

"I love how it feels," she mused, less to him than to herself. "I love the shape of it."

Hak grit his teeth, tamping down a noise that would be unbecoming of a general. But he wasn't a general now, was he?

"I wondered what it would feel like," Yona murmured, squeezing just enough to worry a lesser man. The flesh throbbed and swelled in response, as if it were answering her command.

In a flash she laid him bare, robes and ties all pushed out of the way, and Hak couldn't bear to watch her any longer. He fixed his eyes on the clear night sky, willing his heart to beat at a reasonable speed. In the palace, everyone had called him handsome. Everyone except, of course, Yona, who would rather have eaten live snakes. Most days it was hard to tell the games they played from their true feelings. Had she found him handsome then? Did she find him handsome now?

"Are you satisfied?" he said, in his raw voice, looking anywhere but at her.

She pressed her palms to his chest, levering her whole weight against them. "No way," she said. "This wasn't even my question."

There was a shifting of fabric, the touch of flesh against his thighs.

"Hold still," she said, breathless now, "I think... I have it..."

And then a sweet wet sound as every nerve in Hak's body collapsed and burst again, as he half arched off the ground with the suddenness of it. Yona slid down onto his cock, hot and soft and better than anything he deserved. It wasn't until she took his face in her hands that he realized he was staring up at her, his eyes improbably wide.

"Shh," she said. "Thank you. You're wonderful."

Hak sank back into the grass, wrung out and weak as if he had already come but without the satisfaction. He was sure she'd taken a year off his life with that stunt. Yona lifted up and sank back down again, her breath flickering in her throat. Her hair bounced against her cheek with every thrust; her neckline started to inch open over her heaving chest. She looked down at him, and for the first time in his life Hak could believe that there was something divine in the royal bloodline, something immortal and implacably benevolent. Something ancient. For the first time he could almost believe that he was not only _necessary._ He could almost believe he was loved.

Yona leaned down to him, her pale eyes dark with so much love that Hak thought he might choke on it. "You're doing so well," she said.

Hak burned with embarrassment. I'm a grown man, he wanted to say, I'm a general of the wind clan with more men dead by my hand than there are fish in the sea, I don't need you to reassure me. But instead of saying that, he only reached up and grabbed her shoulder, as if he could pull her into himself. He thought he had known girls before, but he had never known anything like Yona.

She took him quicker and quicker, straining into the pace, as if she was chasing something. She gripped at his hair, pulling it painfully tight. "Is there more?" she muttered, "there's got to be- there has to be more, I need-"

Hak let out a breath that was almost a prayer of relief. "Yes," he said, "yes, let me-"

He pushed up through her skirts and buried his fingers in the slippery flesh, sliding over and grinding down into the pert nub that made her thighs shake. Every flinch and gasp of pleasure was yes, yes, yes let me be useful, yes, let me give you this. He lived for the little sounds that she made.

What a cost it all came at. How could he live the rest of his life knowing how it had felt to make Yona shake and moan on top of him, in the stars and the darkness and the desolate wilderness. How could he ever look back now? How could he ever be sorry?

There is something fatal, Hak thought—a thousand miles from his twitching body—in loving so very much.


End file.
